For what itīs worth, there are some truly spectacular moments in The Shape of Water, writer/director Guillermo del Toroīs new fantastical romance. True to most of his films, the cinematography (this time by Dan Laustsen) is marvelous. The film, led with such heart by the criminally underrated Sally Hawkins, is more than just a visual feast, too, with its gorgeous underwater scenes and a lovely ballroom dance interlude. At its best, it explores the urgency of love when everything else seems helpless.But with all its grandeur and charm, the fact that this is a love story between a woman and a monster is too ridiculous to ignore. The creature is a tall amphibian-type kept in a super-secret lab that somehow manages to seduce Elisa (Hawkins), the otherwise normal cleaning woman who washes around its incubator each evening.There is nothing wrong, per se, with inter-species relationships in film. E.T. is iconic, Her is a modern classic, and you canīt tell me that Christopher Robin and Winnie The Pooh didnīt love one another. But thatīs the thing with The Shape of Water: It goes beyond your typical human-rescues-other narrative, where the often lonely character finds a fascinating creature to which she instantly clings.Where it goes too far is when Elisa and her newly rescued creature, who she ends up stealing from the lab and preserving in her own bathtub, knock boots in her bathroom (which she flooded just right so she and her lover could have more room together). Elisa giggles about it with her friend/co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) like a schoolgirl whose cherry was just popped. Itīs one thing to ask audiences to suspend belief for this fairy tale, and itīs a whole other thing to ask them to consider for one moment that an otherwise sane woman would be so desperate as to fall for a creature who canīt even survive on dry land--not when there are actual men in this town.The Beauty and the Beast syndrome is irksome as well. Why does the woman always have to be the on ...
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